May 22, 2012, 8:00 am
By Mark Sample
Last week Amy introduced the Mozilla Thunderbird-based email client Postbox. I’ve been a Postbox user for years, ever since it was a free beta project. I came to rely on Postbox so much that I gladly paid for it when Postbox was officially released.
In addition to the features Amy mentioned—like Postbox’s seamless integration with Gmail and its plethora of keyboard shortcuts (press V to quickly move a message into a folder!)—I also appreciate Postbox’s powerful search functions.
As Amy explained, Postbox also works with extensions. I wanted to highlight a few of the add-ons I have found to be especially useful:
- The combination of Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar enables two-way sync with all of your Google calendars.
- Zindus syncs your Postbox contacts with your Google/Gmail contacts.
- Quicktext creates smart email templates, allowing you to send personalized (yet…
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April 20, 2012, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
Late last month saw the debut of the Journal of Digital Humanities, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that features “the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community” during the previous quarter. ProfHacker readers ought to find this new journal, edited by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s Dan Cohen and Joan Fragaszy Troyano, worth a look. (Full disclosure/humblebrag: I have a piece in the issue.)
If the contents of the inaugural issue—which range from an essay arguing that humanists need to understand and interpret quantitative data to a review of the WordSeer text analysis tool—fall outside your usual scholarly domain, then certainly the journal’s editorial and publishing apparatus will pique your interest. As Dan Cohen explained in a separate blog post, the journal operates under the model of catching the…
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April 4, 2012, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
In August 2010, Google announced it would be shutting down Google Wave, the real-time collaborative environment that was supposed to solve the problems that plague email as a platform for getting things done.
Google Wave never gained traction, however. Whether its interface didn’t hit the sweet spot of innovation and usability, or people are simply too wedded to existing forms of electronic communication, it’s difficult to say. Happily, some of Wave’s best features have been integrated into Google Documents (such as live collaborative editing of shared documents).
Ever since January 31, 2012, Google Wave has been read-only. And finally, at the end of April, Google Wave will be closing entirely. If you still believe in the ideas behind Google Wave, you might be interested in two open source projects that build on Wave: Apache Wave and Walkaround (which has a feature that…
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March 20, 2012, 8:00 am
By Mark Sample
We’ve frequently discussed the challenges and rewards of letting students use their laptops in the classroom. The primary concern, of course, is that students will be clowning around on their computers or iPads rather than focusing on the course material. Jason has provided five tips for dealing with gadgets in the classroom, and Ryan has shared his own digital etiquette policy. More recently, guest ProfHacker Jason Farman has shown how he has actually encouraged—with a pedagogical intent—technological distraction in the classroom.
And now, for another perspective on the question of laptops in the classroom, I recommend a new report from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan. Available online or as a formatted PDF, the report “examined student perceptions of how laptops affect attentiveness, engagement, and learning” among…
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February 28, 2012, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
Numerous posts on ProfHacker have considered how to create and sustain a professional online identity, including Miriam Posner’s Primer for Academics, Jentery Sayer’s advice for job candidates, and George’s open thread on personal versus professional websites.
Here I want to introduce a very simple idea for any professor, alt-ac, or student who does indeed have his or her own professional website. It is quite simply: promote your talks and appearances.
In a prominent position on your site, maintain an up-to-date list of upcoming conference presentations, invited talks, readings, gallery shows, or any other appearances that are related to your academic life.
What are the benefits to publicizing your talks this way? Visitors to your site can see what you’re up to. You’ll end up with a record of what you’ve done—an archive that is especially handy when you write your …
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February 16, 2012, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
I’ve written about many developments in the Zotero ecosystem recently, but this is definitely the most hackish. How about setting up your own Zotero server, where you can access your Zotero references, PDF attachments, and even web snapshots from any browser on any computer. And how about being able to run this server on almost any web hosting service, including free ones?
That’s exactly what Christian Holz’s phpZoteroWebDAV 2.0 does. Holz’s program creates a PHP-based WebDav server, to which you can sync your Zotero attachments (e.g. PDFs associated with citations and snapshots of your Zoteroed pages). The program then uses Zotero’s API to pull in the citations themselves from your Zotero library, allowing you to view, browse, and search virtually every element of your Zotero library from your own server.
Why might you want to do this?
One of Zotero’s powerful features is it…
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February 9, 2012, 3:00 pm
By Mark Sample
The research and reference manager Zotero is one of our favorite tools at ProfHacker, and there have been several recent developments worth mentioning to our readers.
Most notably, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has officially released Zotero 3.0. I reviewed a beta version of this so-called standalone Zotero back in August. Like the beta version, this latest release can run outside a browser. You can use connector plugins to add Zotero functionality to Chrome and Safari. (The original Firefox extension that started it all has also been updated to 3.0 and is as reliable as ever.) Aside from being browser-independent, two long awaited features of Zotero 3.0 include duplicate detection and a totally revamped, sleek new Microsoft Word and OpenOffice add-in.
Also, independent developer Mikko Rönkkö has released the first ever Zotero client for the iPad, called
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February 2, 2012, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
I am not a fan of Getting Things Done.
I mean Getting Things Done, as in GTD, David Allen’s organizational and productivity method, though I also balk at just plain old getting things done. To wit, rather than join the Cult of Inbox Zero, I simply asked my campus IT to increase the size of my inbox by a gig.
Still, there are times when I need to-do lists. Sometimes big long multi-step lists focused on a single goal (say, taking care of the Kafkaesque-style barrage of forms, receipts, and signatures needed to get reimbursement for travel expenses). And sometimes merely a one-item list reminding me to pick up something at the grocery store (say, pickles. (Don’t Ask.))
For a while I’ve relied on Google Tasks, which I had high hopes for ever since Google opened its API. But frankly, Google Tasks stinks. Or at least the Android and iOS apps that use the Google Tasks API stink….
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January 19, 2012, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
If you’re a scholar or student in the humanities and you’re having trouble making progress on that latest article or essay you’re supposed to write, chances are that you’re thinking too hard.
What? Thinking too hard?
Yes, thinking too hard. Thinking is the bane of our existence in the humanities, rooted in Romantic visions of the lone and misunderstood genius, conjuring thoughts of philosophical profundity out of nothingness. If that’s how scholarly discourse truly proceeded, we’d have thousands of awe-inspiring, world-rocking treatises at the end of every finals week or whenever a scholar was faced with a looming deadline.
We don’t, of course. We get bullshit. And I mean that in the most analytically rigorous Frankfurtian kind of way. But it’s bullshit nonetheless.
And the reason is that we and our students think too much and don’t work enough.
Now, I’m using a very…
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December 15, 2011, 3:00 pm
By Mark Sample
Up until last spring, we at ProfHacker often recommended TwapperKeeper as a way to archive the backchannel Twitter feed of a conference or classroom. Then in March, TwapperKeeper announced it would no longer allow the downloading of archives (though they would still be visible on the website itself). Now, we’re sad to say, TwapperKeeper is going away forever. All of it. The service will no longer archive tweets, and existing archives will disappear on January 6, 2012. The company has been bought by HootSuite and while paid HootSuite Pro customers will be able to archive tweets in a similar fashion, users of HootSuite’s free service will not have archiving privileges.
So, let’s say you captured an awesome hashtag on TwapperKeeper and forgot to download it last March when you had the chance. What can you do?
There are several tricks you can try:
- Martin Hawksey has created a…
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